


Back to Back

by melimarron



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Gen, POV Susan Pevensie, Susan Pevensie Never Forgot, any tips would be appreciated, basically susan runs a school and the students start going to narnia, im kind of scared but whatever, thats it thats the summary, this is my first work on ao3 so
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-25 16:09:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20727014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melimarron/pseuds/melimarron
Summary: Narnia has taken everything from Susan. Why should she embrace it again when the time comes?





	Back to Back

Narnia is nothing to Susan.

Narnia kicked her out. Narnia doesn’t want her. Narnia turned its back on Susan. It’s a pity that Peter doesn’t see that. He still thinks that he could go back to Narnia, even be welcomed there.

(When he dies, when their parents and Lucy and Edmund and Eustace and Jill and Polly and Digory are all dead and gone, Susan remembers a conversation she had with Peter, where she denied Narnia’s existence. His face went hard and cold, and none of Susan’s siblings treated her the same way after that.)

(They didn’t know that Susan was rejecting Narnia. She’d spent enough time longing for it. She’d grown up in Narnia, had fought for and defended Narnia. Narnia turned its back on her first.)

When Susan and her siblings reappeared on that train platform after she and Peter had been exiled forever from their home, Susan felt something break inside of her.

_We have to know you on Earth?_ she thought angrily, furiously, as she put on a quick layer of makeup. She did like makeup; it made her feel more queenly and confident, not that she needed more confidence now that she’d had a crown on her head. _We knew you in Narnia. We knew you, and I ran my hands through your mane._

_Aren’t I enough? Isn’t my belief enough?_

She grows up, watching her body echoing the changes it had gone through years before. She and her siblings grow more and more distant, and if one of them brings up Narnia, Susan is quick to shut it down, because ignoring Narnia was easier than acknowledging that it existed and that it had locked itself to her and Peter, because their bodies and minds had betrayed them and grown older.

Then she gets a phone call.

Then her world shatters.

Then she prepares and attends eight funerals and after each one she screams at Aslan until her voice is so hoarse she can barely give the eulogy for the next funeral she has to organize and attend. She eventually turns to God for solace, and when looking through the Bible, she sees some strange similarities. Memories of Narnia shoot through her mind, faster than her arrows. _You have to know who I am in your world._

After making the connection, Susan is angrier than she’s ever been. As- Asl- no, she can’t say the name, she can’t confirm that _he_ was an all-powerful being, she can’t even think the G-word, she has to call him a _being_, because _everyone says you’re supposed to be loving and what kind of loving is this, in exile forever because of nylons and makeup?_

_I’m not as loyal as Lucy or as brave as Peter or as repentant as Edmund, and for that I was punished. Aren’t I enough? Aren’t you a loving being? Why wasn’t I enough? I thought you forgave people._

Susan knew that she wasn’t enough. She, as a person, was not enough. She wasn’t good enough for Narnia. Asl- that _lion_ had seen her putting on makeup and laughing with a boy on a date and he had decided that she wasn’t good and pure enough for Heaven. She wasn’t as faithful as Lucy, or as heroic as Peter, or as remorseful as Edmund and Eustace.

_I thought you forgave all sins,_ Susan snarled to the lion in the privacy of her mind. _I thought you were supposed to be loving and forgiving, and you killed my family and left me here alone. Why? What did they do to make you so angry? They were more loyal to you than I ever was. Why did you allow them to die?_

Sometimes, Susan wonders whether her siblings and Eustace and Jill and Digory and Polly went to Narnia when they died. That just makes her angrier than ever. They couldn’t be in Narnia in life, so they go to Narnia in death? That’s not fair. That’s not fair at all. Lucy was destroyed without Narnia. What kind of being would ever sentence Lucy, and Peter, and Edmund to exile, however temporary, on Earth, when they _thrived_ in Narnia? What kind of being would allow Polly and Digory to witness the birth of a world and see the wonders of magic, only to shove them out and lock the doors forever?

She moves to America as soon as possible. She won’t have to learn a whole new language there, and there aren’t many memories of Narnia there. She uses everything she has as Queen Susan the Gentle, the woman who went through childhood twice, and establishes a boarding school in Maine. She thinks she’s good at it. The teachers she hires are good, parents have few complaints. For a while, it’s perfect.

Then one day a child comes running up to her, babbling about how the old painting of the ocean that Susan had hidden in a shed had come to life. The child excitedly told her all about an amazing world where lions were all-powerful and trees could dance and animals could talk and there was a trio of rulers, two kings and a queen, and there was a fourth throne but it had been empty for fifty years.

Susan felt her heart twisting at the little girl’s happy babbling, because of course Narnia has gone on, even though it’s left her behind. _I knew I should have burned that painting_. She manages a weak smile at the child and does not ask her any questions. She does not want the child to bring Narnia up any more than she has to.

At the same time, though, Susan refuses to discourage discussion of Narnia. Just because she can’t stand the thought of what Narnia’s done to her doesn’t mean that Narnia can’t be wonderful to a new victim/child.

Eventually, Narnia becomes an open secret. The teachers and staff at the school ignore it, for the most part. Then one, a man, quietly confesses that he went to the same school as Lucy and Edmund had, and had once seen a huge lion and a young man attacking a group of bullies. The teacher described the young man, and Susan knew that it was Caspian. After that, the teachers slowly start to believe. What really causes all of them to believe in Narnia is the day a second child goes to Narnia and returns with a dragon’s head as proof.

(The head is promptly cut up and incinerated. Susan isn’t a fool- she and the school will definitely be investigated if someone who doesn’t know about Narnia catches sight of the head and goes running to the authorities about the Pevensie Boarding School somehow having the head of a gigantic mutant lizard.)

More and more children under Susan’s watch go to Narnia, and eventually, it seems like half the school has gone, and the other half are practically leaping into closets, diving into paintings, climbing into chests, zipping themselves into suitcases, running into boulders, and jumping out of trees in an effort to somehow activate the mystical magic that could transport them to Narnia.

Susan watches them cautiously, and pulls aside the ones who come stumbling into the cafeteria with limbs that suddenly seem too short and scratching at scars that no longer exist. The ones who have been rudely stuffed and slammed and shoved into bodies too young for their minds. They are the ones who hear her whole story, who learn that she, too, was forced to spend years regrowing her body, stifling the instincts of a queen who had won wars and forcing herself to forget, to hurt Narnia as badly as it hurt her. She has a kind of quiet understanding with these adults turned children. They will not be pushed back into acting like a child, as she had been. They will find out how to be themselves again. She gives them the chance to sword-fight and practice archery and ride horses and learn Earth medical procedures. She gives them what she never had, so that they will never become her.

One of her fondest memories is when she first started teaching archery and horseback riding. She’d stunned all of them with a perfect bull’s eye while riding a horse, her eyes and arms reacting perfectly. The practice had, to her satisfaction, paid off. Susan’s favorite part of the memory was when one boy (who’d only spent a few weeks in Narnia and so wasn’t privy to the secret of Susan’s own adventures in Narnia) had blurted out, “Not even Queen Susan the Lost could have done that!”.

Eventually, one of the “short-comers”, the lucky ones who only spent a matter of weeks or days in Narnia instead of months or years, somehow figures out that _she’s_ the legendary Queen Susan the Gentle. Some call her Queen Susan the Missing, Queen Susan the Exiled, or Queen Susan the Lost, which are all new. She quickly makes it clear that while she will not stop them from traveling or talking about Narnia, she will not tolerate anyone asking her about her experiences there unless she, Susan, offered up the information.

She discovers, through the children, that Lucy, Edmund, Peter, Eustace, Jill, Digory, and Polly are alive and well in Narnia. Jill and Eustace are duke and duchess. Digory and Polly are something akin to gods, as they were the only still-living witnesses, besides the lion, to Narnia’s beautiful birth. Lucy, Peter, and Edmund are ruling Narnia. There is a fourth throne that nobody is allowed to sit on. Aslan tells the children who come to Narnia that it represents hope.

When Susan hears that, she is torn between laughing and screaming. _Hope_. Hope that she would return? That ship had sailed the day she’d been exiled.

One day, a young teenage boy comes to Susan’s office, half-sobbing and hysterical, and confesses that he thinks he’s offended the lion because he’s been exiled forever from Narnia, but he didn’t even do _anything_, and he’d tried so hard to be faithful and loyal and he had no idea what he’d done wrong-

Susan had never been closer to ripping down the barrier between herself and Narnia through sheer force of will to scream at the lion for _daring_ to exile another person from Narnia than she was at that moment. How _dare_ he exile this sweet, kind, boy who reminded Susan so strongly of Lucy? How _dare_ he force a new generation of people to suffer what she had?

Narnia had turned its back on Susan years before; she was twenty-one when her family “died”, and she was thirty-four now. But before, had a doorway to Narnia appeared in front of her, Susan was sure that she would have marched right through, leaving only a note, perhaps, to explain what had happened.

But now, now, when she knew that the lion was still treating living human beings as his playthings, to exile and love and hate as he pleased, she hoped that she would never return.

But as it was, Susan was just Susan. She did not have a lion on her side, not any more. She did not have her siblings or her cousin, and hadn’t had them for over a decade. She was alone, and she could never force her way into Narnia to scream and weep and wail in pure anger for being exiled, for being forgotten, for being forced to watch children discover the joy of another world, only to be completely and utterly crushed and changed forever when they’re banished into the cruel, hard, world of their birth.

So she simply hugged the boy, and told him that she knew how it felt. Then, swallowing back the bitter taste in her throat, because this boy would never end up permanently exiled, as she had been, she told him to continue to have faith in the lion, because while Narnia may have turned its back on him, _he_ didn’t have to turn his back on Narnia, and he shouldn’t.

He looked up at her with tears in his eyes and swore to her with a trembling voice that he’d never give up on Narnia, not _ever_, and he would be faithful to the lion _forever_, no matter what happened.

(Susan had to bite her tongue from replying that she’d been faithful to the lion once, too, but she’d wavered in her faith and had decided that she wanted to be popular and wear nylons and had been exiled from paradise forever. For _popularity_. It was such a small thing, and yet she’d been punished harshly, so very harshly, for that. She _knew_ what she’d lost, and why she’d lost it. Popularity wasn’t worth banishment, but Susan hadn’t known that wanting to be popular would exile her from her home.)

(The reasons for her banishment were more complicated than her decision to be popular. Unbeknownst to her, Susan had turned her back on Narnia before Narnia had truly turned its back on her. Unbeknownst to her, Susan would do far more good on Earth than in Narnia, drawing on her years as Queen Susan the Gentle and applying those skills to life as Principal Pevensie.)

The years wore on, and more and more children, shattered from their newest experience in Narnia, come to Susan, sobbing and begging her to do something, to tell them what they were doing wrong, because the lion exiled them from Narnia forever and they had no idea what they’d done that was so awful.

Every time a new child comes to her, Susan seethes inside. Aren’t her siblings the rulers of Narnia now? Don’t they know the pain of being exiled? Or had their own temporary exiles been simply a blip on their radars, a momentary depression in their lives that surely couldn’t have been all that bad? Had they forgotten Earth already?

The banished children, and the not-yet-banished children, come together and carve a large stone statue resembling the lion. When Susan sees it, she bursts into laughter. A few weeks after the statue is put on its pedestal outside the school, the lion has a pair of charcoal glasses and a charcoal moustache. The students and staff search furiously for the vandalizer while Susan chuckles to herself over a cup of tea and remembers her little brother. The identity of the vandalizer is never discovered.

When Susan was fifty-two, the first banished child, the boy who’d been so shocked and horrified to be banished despite her warnings that it may happen one day, vanished. Susan was perplexed at first, as she’d hired the boy- now a man- to teach classes at the school, which had become more of a Narnia Rehabilitation Center than a school, and then she found a note that he’d left behind. He had returned to Narnia, possibly (and hopefully) for good. He promised to put in a good word for the other banished children-who-were-now-adults, but especially for Susan.

She waits, and even prays, although the G-word still tastes foul in her mouth, and there is never an answer. More and more of the children-who-were-now-adults that she had once taught were disappearing from their lives, often with nothing but a hastily scrawled note left behind. The notes were typically apologies, but every one made it clear that they were leaving and they would not be returning, with any luck.

Susan tried not to feel bitter whenever the news that yet another child had left Earth for Narnia. Another child stolen. Another person entranced by Narnia so much that they never gave up on it, even years after the lion banished them.

At the same time, she rages inside. _Why aren’t I enough? What more do you need from me? Aren’t I enough? What am I doing wrong?_

There is no answer. There is never an answer. Susan knows that. It doesn’t stop her from silently screaming out her pain in her thoughts. _Why aren’t I good enough for you? I wanted to be pretty and popular and liked, and so I was banished from your world, your beautiful, perfect, world. Why do you only take in the ones who follow your rules? Why are the rest of us worthless to you? I thought you loved all of us! I thought you forgave people!_

Some of the children-now-adults who went to Narnia never go back. They grow up hollow-eyed, lashing out at the new generation of children they teach, the ones who had also gone to Narnia and hadn’t yet learned that Narnia is as beautiful as it is cruel, the ones who looked at the exiled adults and thought _well, that’ll never happen to me_. Susan sets those sneering, jaded, adults straight, coldly retelling them her own story and informing them that they would be out of a job if these childish, _savage_, taunts continued.

Susan was a queen, once. Her memories of Narnia never faded. Disciplining the angry young men and women who had unwittingly followed in her footsteps rather than her siblings’ came easily to her. Eventually, those angry young men and women learn to follow her example and become earthly kings and queens in their own rights, becoming role models to the new generation of children. Susan watches them with pride.

She never had children, but she hopes that she could have raised them to be half as good as these exiled adults, these wonderful human beings, each one full to the brim with sadness and joy and pain and laughter.

Susan’s memories of Narnia are horribly clear, even thirty years after Narnia had closed its doors to her. There will be no more wonderful jaunts into the lion’s world, no more being looked to as a queen. Instead, Susan has her makeup and her nylons and her school.

She eventually grows too old to continue running the school, and leaves the school to the men and women who were so much like her, exiled forever because they’d fallen in love with parties and friendship, or because they’d started drinking or smoking in order to cope, or because they’d started to care less about Narnia and more about life in the moment. She’d tried to teach them responsibility, and she hoped she’d succeeded.

(The school was still running decades after she stepped down, so Susan figured she’d done a good job with them. A few of the exiled adults left, wanting nothing to do with Narnia, but most stayed to teach and- hopefully- find their own way back home one day.)

Susan visits the school occasionally, partially to confirm that she hasn’t died/somehow gone back to Narnia, and partially to encourage the students there- past and present. To the exiled adults, she smiles at them and tells them they’re doing wonderfully, because they are, and that they’ve done a fine job of carving out lives for themselves after Narnia, because they have. To the recently exiled children, she tells the story of her siblings, how they’d never lost faith even as she had. To the children who still loved Narnia and the lion with all their hearts, not having experienced the betrayal of growing too old, she tells them that they _will_ go back one day, and until then, she listens to their stories of battling dragons and dancing with trees. She does her best to give everyone hope.

(Her siblings are rarely, if ever, mentioned in the newest generation’s stories about Narnia. They are the ancient kings and queens of Narnia, the most valiant, magnificent, and just people to ever rule. Apparently, her throne still stands empty. There are three rulers of Narnia, now, and an empty throne. She has become an ancient hope for the Narnians, the lost queen of Narnia, the monarch of ancient times. She’s become something of a King Arthur to the Narnians, something that she finds endlessly funny, considering her situation.)

(She is sad to know that her siblings are truly dead, but she mourned them decades ago, and even after she knew they were alive, she never expected to see them again. Still, to have the small possibility of seeing her family again stolen from her leaves Susan almost breathless. She can’t quite stop the tears from coming the first time a child thoughtlessly remarks that a descendant of one of Susan’s students had become one of the new rulers of Narnia after the Lucy Pevensie Dynasty died out. Apparently, Peter’s line had died out some time ago, but Edmund’s was still going strong.)

When Susan dies in her sleep at eighty two years old, she leaves her money and her school and the identity of the mysterious lion vandalizer to the children that she had taught, the ones who had gone to Narnia and ended up turning their backs to it. The children who had grown old and had given everything to Narnia, only to be rejected. When she closes her eyes the night of her death, she dreams of Narnia.

When she opens them, she is lying in a grassy field, and a lion stands before her. He looks at her, and Susan stares back at him as steadily as she can, her hands shaking, her sight blurring with angry tears.

Behind the lion, there is a crowd of people and animals, and next to the lion, there are three people, two men and a woman. Tension is high- perhaps because they’re witnessing a woman who’d walked their world hundreds of years ago being alive. All three of the humans next to the lion wear crowns, and one of the men holds a fourth crown in his hands. Susan recognizes it- it’s _her_ crown, the one that she’d thought she’d lost forever when she’d left Narnia the first time.

Susan stands with all the dignity she can muster, still staring the lion in his golden eyes. She wants an explanation. She wants acknowledgement of what she’d suffered on Earth. She wants her family back. She doesn’t say anything. The lion will speak first, or he will have to deal with her silence. It’s petty, but Susan was ignored for long enough. Let him try to mend the gap for a change. She’s tried thousands of times, and he’s never responded. Perhaps it would be better if he were the one to initiate conversation for once.

“My child,” the lion finally says, his voice a soft rumble, “you have returned. I… am sorry.”

That’s it.

That’s all she gets.

Decades of suffering, of pleading, of helping others in the hopes that one day, she would be just as good as Lucy and Edmund and Peter, and all she gets is an _I’m sorry_.

Susan knows she should be enraged, but at the same time, she never expected Aslan to allow her back, much less allow her back and then _apologize_ for taking so long. So all she says to him, to the being that had forced her (and the children she was supposed to protect) to suffer more than she had ever thought possible, is, “Thank you.”

The words come out sharp and bitter, shaped by a lifetime of being left behind. It’s clear to everyone watching that Susan is thanking Aslan for the apology, not for abandoning her. The tension in the air rises.

One of the kings, the one holding Susan’s crown, slowly steps forward after Susan and Aslan’s short exchange. “Queen Susan,” he begins, “my name is King Leonard.” He gestured at his fellow rulers. “This is my younger brother, King Joseph. We’re descendants of your brother, King Edmund. This is Queen Katherine, the descendant of one of your students. The first one to return to Narnia permanently.”

Susan nods. “I see,” she says. Her voice isn’t as crackly with age as it had been, and she glances down at herself, noting the lack of wrinkles and weakness or pain in her body. She must be forty or fifty years younger than she was on Earth. She takes it in stride. It’s not the first time she’s been deaged. At least she doesn’t have to deal with puberty for a third time.

King Leonard licks his lips nervously, and holds out the crown to her. “You are a hero to us Narnians,” he says. “First you were a legendary queen, and then a legendary leader. An exiled leader, yes, but a leader nevertheless. You have wisdom that has been hard-earned, both from Narnia and Earth. If you take up your crown again, all of Narnia would be in debt to you, more so than we already are, with you being a Pevinsie and all.”

“Thank you,” Susan says.

Leonard fidgets with his robes with his free hand. “You’re a Pevinsie,” he repeats. “You’d be High Queen. Aslan himself agrees with that decision. You’re the eldest Pevinsie, after all, and I’d honestly feel odd trying to order a living legend around. You’ve got experience nobody else does. You’d have to be brought up to speed about the politics of modern life, but you’d have power nobody’s had since High King Peter himself.”

“High Queen.” Susan echoes blankly. “And I’d have more power? Such as the power to tell people to stop telling young children that they’re banished from Narnia forever when they aren’t?”

Aslan lowers his head. “They must find me in their own world, as you and your siblings had to,” he says. “It is cruel, yes, but they come back all the stronger for it.”

Susan scoffs. She’s on the verge of saying no, but a fear stronger than anything she’s ever felt grips her. _What if I say no and they send me back to the school, and I have to live the rest of my life knowing that I’d refused to go home when I had the chance? Surely I can warn the young travelers that they’ll be banished one day. Surely I can continue helping children as a queen, especially with three others helping me. Perhaps I can’t help them personally, but I’ll have influence and I’ll be able to do _more_ as a queen._

She takes a deep breath and reaches out for the crown.

Queen Susan the Gentle has returned to Narnia.


End file.
